Incompetence

by Rob Grant

I asked for my phone call. Zuccho flipped me a coin gleefully and wished me luck finding a friend who'd be prepared to talk to me.

  I wasn't going to call a lawyer. What good would that do me? I could call Home, and leave a message, but that would get me nowhere in a big fat hurry. My cover was blown, and the policy is official denial.

  No. I was going to put Zuccho's coin to better use. I was going to call Gina, or at least someone at the hotel who could get a message to Gina. I dug the hotel number out of my pocket and dialled.

  A woman picked up the phone and said in a voice that had become far too familiar to me: 'Restaurant. How may I help you?'

  In-be-credi-lievable. I'd called the wrong hotel. I'd called that cesspit of a flea dive in Rome. There was no way Zuccho was going to flip me another coin. He couldn't wait to clap me in irons and melt the key. I decided to try a long shot.

  'Listen. This is a very big favour I'm going to ask you. I'm trying to get through to the Hotel Ambassadeur in Paris.'

  'Well, this is the Belize Hotel in Rome.'

  'I know, I know. I dialled the wrong number, and I don't have any more change. Do you think you could put me through to the Ambassadeur?'

  'You want me to transfer you to the Hotel Ambassadeur in Paris?'

  'I know it's a lot to ask.'

  'You want the restaurant manager of a hotel in Rome to put your call through to a hotel in Paris?'

  'Like I say: I know it's a big favour.'

  There was a pause. I wondered if she'd recognised my voice. Probably not, because finally, she agreed. 'OK, I'll try.'

  I was beginning to revise my opinion of the restaurant manager. I made a personal, sacred vow never to subject the poor woman to verbal violence again, of a sexual or any other kind of nature. I dug out the Ambassadeur's number, the right one this time, and gave it to her. She asked me to hold. I listened to the ringing. I heard the click of the receiver being lifted, and then I heard her voice again. 'Restaurant,' she said. 'How may I help you?'

  I gave her verbal violence all right. I gave her a whole pent-up tankload of extremely sexually explicit verbal violence, then I thought up some more and gave her that, too. Then I hung up. I thought of some more verbal violence I would have liked to have given her after I'd hung up, but by then it was too late. I'd use it next time, though. I'd definitely use it next time. Because there surely would be a next time.

  Zuccho was waiting for me with a big, fat grin on his big, fat face. I wished Dr Rutter would work on that face. I'd like to see how it looked sewn onto my backside.

  He led me by the elbow through processing. He didn't want to miss a minute of my misery. On the positive side, I have to say he was more relaxed than I'd ever seen him before. He hardly threatened anybody with lethal violence.

  They made me hand over the contents of my pockets, my watch, and my trouser belt. I bent down to remove the laces from my shoes, but the desk sergeant didn't want them. Oh no. He wanted the entire shoes.

  I straightened. 'You want my shoes?'

  'I do.'

  'Both of them?'

  'Just the left and the right.'

  Deeply troubled, I made a big business out of removing my shoes and placing them tenderly on the desk, like they were no more precious than newborn twins.

  'You're going to look after them, right?'

  The desk sergeant smiled. 'Of course I'll look after them; I'll treat them like royalty.' Then he grabbed the shoes roughly, stapled a label on them, and hurled them brutally into a box with a whole bunch of other shoes. 'Oh look, there's been a revolution. Liberty, equality, fraternity. The Shoes Royale are mingling with the common citizen shoes. How about that? Let's hope they don't meet Madame Guillotine.'

  I stared forlornly at the shoes I'd probably never see again. To me, they did look regal, lying there among the courgette-and beetroot-hide trash that passed for footwear, if only just. That desk sergeant had plans for those shoes, and I knew it. 'Don't you usually just take the laces?'

  'Used to. Not any more. You'd be surprised how many detainees beat themselves to death with the heels of their shoes.'

  'People beat themselves to death with their own shoes?'

  'Regularly.'

  'That does surprise me.'

  'Right.' He grinned. 'But then, you haven't been down to the holding cells, yet, have you?'

  EIGHTEEN

  We descended some very steep, dimly lit steps, me with one hand on my waistband, struggling to prevent my trousers from crumpling to my ankles, and the other firmly clasping the rail, desperate to keep my footing in my slippery cotton socks, all the time giddied along by legally 'harmless', yet astonishingly painful shocks to the small of my back, administered willy-nilly by a cop who was overly fond of his electrified truncheon.

  We stepped out into the fluorescent light of the holding cells.

  There were a lot of holding cells.

  A lot of holding cells.

  Perspex pens, maybe thirty metres square, stretched away as far as the eye could see, separated by a network of thin corridors. The room must have taken up the entire city block. Maybe more.

  And yet every square centimetre of legitimate seating space was taken up with unbelted trouser buttock, and every footstep's worth of floor room was occupied by shoeless feet. Each pen must have been accommodating at least fifty men, and there had to be more than twenty pens, ranked around the vast room. Maybe double that.

  And this was just for people waiting to be arraigned for an offence.

  Already, I felt like clubbing myself to death with a shoe.

  The cop gave me another painful shot in the back. I explained to him that, like many human beings, I was capable of responding to language, especially simple, polite commands, such as 'Would you care to go this way, please,' and 'Hurry along there, old chap, if you wouldn't mind,' so he zapped me again.

  I turned to see he was prodding me down towards a further set of stairs. There was more of this?

  There was more of this all right.

  We descended to the next level, me trying to strike a reasonable balance between not going so fast my socks might slip on the concrete steps and not going so slow as to risk yet another sizzling from Terry Truncheon behind me and his frazzling friend.

  The next level was identical to the first. Identically over-populated, too.

  So we went down yet another set of steps.

  And then another.

  I was 'assisted' down at least twenty-three flights of steep stairs before I gave up counting in favour of fighting for breath and staving off claustrophobia.

  And still, we kept going down.

  It was at this precise moment, I think, that I conquered my recently acquired fear of elevators. I decided I'd rather risk being trapped in a lift for all eternity or being blasted out of the solar system in an elevator car than set foot on another staircase ever again.

  I began to fancy I caught the odd whiff of sulphur and brimstone curling up from the floors below, and the distant moaning of souls in eternal torment.

  Down, down we went. You may not know this, but all big men have a very rational fear of falling and never getting up again. That fear was exponentially multiplied here by the reasonable dread that any sudden stumble might send me crashing down the endless, steep concrete steps, with my trousers around my ankles, as far as I knew all the way to the molten core of the planet Earth.

  Just as I was on the very brink of grabbing the guard's truncheon off him and assessing its effectiveness as a rectal thermometer, we reached what appeared to be the bottom level.

  It seemed no less crowded than any of the others we'd passed.

  It turned out, though, that this particular level of the Inferno had its own unique attractions. A construction team was noisily busy building yet another floor below. After which, presumably, they'd start on the floor below that, then the floor below that.

  It's a very simple equation: the more laws you pass, the more laws there are to break, and the more lawbreakers yo
u'll have to deal with and accommodate.

  So the construction team worked around the clock, in shifts, to provide all the detainees with that most demonic of cacophonies to the poor soul in search of sleep: intermittent and unpredictable bursts of industrial-strength power tools in unbearably close proximity. Hell's own orchestra.

  I shuffled along the corridor between the pens. Sad wretches in tieless shirts pressed their hope-drained faces against the bullet-proof perspex that stood between them and the sweet air of freedom.

  I was herded into the last of the pens with a final electronic flourish, and the perspex door slid shut behind me. I took a moment to watch him leave, trying to hate him well enough to vow blood vengeance, but failing, then turned to face my fellow internees.

  Bizarrely, my pen seemed, if anything, more crowded than any of the others I'd passed. It was crammed so far beyond its capacity, the world's most agoraphobic sardine would have been sweating with fear and pleading to be crammed back inside its tin so it could get a little breathing room.

  I felt a strong wave of communal loathing towards me. Space was already at a premium, and another big, sweaty body was the last thing anyone hoped to be entertaining. I brazened it out and squeezed my way slowly through the muttering, grumbling throng, towards the wall, and, eventually towards a tiny section of the corner of a bed onto which I sank perhaps one tenth of one buttock cheek and breathed the world's longest and most grateful sigh.

  There were maybe a hundred and twenty men in an enclosure built for thirty. A hundred and twenty men. And, as luck would have it, I managed to squeeze myself next to Hinton Wheeler.

  Quite possibly Hinton Wheeler was the unluckiest man in the world. He was almost certainly one of the smelliest.

  He was a short, skinny, mouse-like man, with a shock of unkempt hair and a scraggly Ben Gunn of a beard. His shirt and trousers were ragged and threadbare, and his socks seemed like they'd all but worn away.

  He was smiling at me. I tried not to notice -- rule number one for staying healthy during incarceration: never catch another inmate's eye -- but the smile was so earnest and needy, I found myself inexplicably drawn to return it.

  He introduced himself, and I grunted, trying to inflect the grunt so it sounded sufficiently like 'Fuck off'. But he wouldn't. He had no intention of fucking off. Instead, he came right out and asked me what it was I was in for.

  Now, that question used to be another big prison taboo, but these days, it's considered legit: the real criminals, your professional thieves and hard men, don't like to hang around the kind of Eurotrash idiots who are doing time for displaying their raw meat products next to the roast ham, or quoting prices for pounds and ounces rather than kilos. I mumbled some deliberately ambiguous response, just in case Hinton turned out to be a serial killer, unlikely as that seemed.

  I wasn't looking to carry the conversation on any further, but Hinton clearly hoped I would ask him the reciprocal question. I stonewalled him, and tried not to notice, out of the corner of my eye, his expectant, puppy-like anticipation slowly collapse into a hangdog, crestfallen slump. I tried not to imagine that he'd already tried to initiate some kind of communication with each and every one of the hundred and eighteen other internees and failed. I tried not to feel the palpable waves of desperation and loneliness he gave off. I tried, but I can only take so much.

  'What about you?' I caved in.

  'Me?' He grinned with astonished delight. 'What am I in for? Me -- I'm in for nothing. Nothing at all. Fact is: I'm not even here, officially. I'm officially free. What happened, see, I was working for this law firm, nothing fancy, legal cleric, and I comes here to take a client's statement, but in the middle of it, turns out my firm's decided to downsize me, and my access privileges get automatically revoked. So, when I tries to leave, my pass is invalid, see? And since I don't have a valid pass, I can't have gotten in here in the first place, so the fact is: I can't be here at all. And if I'm not here, they can't let me out, is the way it goes.'

  All this came out in a kind of strange, boring, Zen monotone, so that by the time he'd hit the fourth word of any sentence, you'd already managed to forget the first three. Hinton would have made a perfect government spokesman for dispensing unpalatable news. But, of course, he'd never get past the job interview without driving the interviewer to blow out his own brains rather than ask a second question.

  My eyebrows were striking all the right Bezier curves, but I got the feeling old Hinton wasn't too interested in my actual response. He just needed to talk it out. He just needed to vent. I couldn't have stopped him if I wanted to, so I just kept up the eyebrow aerobics and let him blow off his steam.

  'See, I haven't been accused of a crime, or anything, so there's nothing for them to process. I'm not even allowed to make a phone call -- that's only for people who've been accused of stuff. I don't even have the right to a lawyer, because I'm not charged with anything, so, technically, there's nothing for me to defend myself against. So they tell me. When they bother to tell me anything, which is basically never. So that's it: I'm stuck here. A free man with an unblemished record, and I can't even habeas my own corpus. Get that beat, will you?'

  Like I said, Hinton's voice had this quality, and even though this was possibly the most pathetic tale of dismal luck I'd ever heard, I still found myself fighting to stave off sleep. I thought if I chipped into his monologue, it might help keep me awake. 'So: how long have you been here?'

  'Here? In the processing pens? A little over three and a half years.'

  'Three and a half years?'

  'You heard it right. And get this: I'm still wearing the same pair of underpants. Can you imagine that?' I desperately tried not to imagine that. 'They can't issue me with new clothes, see, because, as per like I said: I'm not here. I don't want to tell you what happens to underpants, even sturdy underpants, after forty solid months of constant wear, but it's not pretty. Believe me, it's not pretty.'

  I believed him. There wasn't enough room for me to put any kind of desirable distance between me and Hinton's veteran underwear, given my already precarious perch on the bed's edge, but I shifted my weight as best I could.

  Three and a half years in the holding pens.

  The worst-case scenario ought to be an overnight stay. Maybe two. But by then you'd be crawling up walls and praying for a shoe to beat your brains out with.

  There were no provisions for long-term internment: no exercise yard, no canteen, nothing in the way of entertainment, and only the most rudimentary and humiliatingly public toilet facilities.

  Three and a half years was inhuman.

  'But isn't there anybody...?' I flailed at the question, already suspecting the answer. 'Haven't you been... missed?'

  Hinton's eyes fired up with ironic delight. 'Me? Missed me? Who's going to miss me? I got fired from my job, remember? You think I have a wife or something? The little lady waiting patiently at home? A guy like me? I haven't had a girlfriend since I was six years old, and she dumped me after one kiss, the little bitch. So what, then? You think I have friends? You imagine there's someone in the world somewhere who can stand my company for more than thirteen seconds without hurling themselves off of a roof? Someone who'd like to go to the ball game with good old Hinton Wheeler? Who'd like to chew the crap with me in some neighbourhood bar and throw back a few cold ones? This is the longest conversation I've ever had with a living person, not counting a few unfortunate telephone salespersons who cold-called me and lived to regret it. You think you'd still be here listening to me if you weren't trapped in a holding pen and pinned back by a wall of human flesh? No, sir. You'd be on a plane to Alaska by now. Anywhere that was at least a hemisphere away from me. There's something about me, see? I bore people. I don't know why, but I know it's true. I don't want to bore people; I want to be interesting. You think I don't want to be interesting? This tale of mine, my current predicament, you'd have thought it was of some kind of interest, at least, wouldn't you? But every time I buttonhole someone and s
tart to tell them, I can see their eyes glaze over. I can see the will to live literally draining out of them. Like with you, now. Why is that? Is it some kind of chemical thing, do you think? I'm giving off, like, bore-omones?'

  I'm admitting to you, here and now, that I've reconstructed Hinton's speeches more from imagination than from memory. Certainly, that's the style in which he spoke, and more or less the gist of his message, but in reality, it washed over me like a grey, sucking fog.

  I had to help him out. I had to help him out even if it was only to stop him talking to me. 'Listen...' I tried not to look like I was trying to remember his name.

  'My name is Hinton,' he offered, wearily.

  'Right, Hinton...'

  'Hinton Wheeler. Though, why I'm telling you, I have no idea. You'll forget it in less than thirty seconds.'

  'I won't.'

  'You will, see...'

  'Now, will you shut up for a second? I'm trying to help you here.'

  'Help me?' This was new ground for Hinton. 'In what way "help me"?'

  'In the way where we get you out of here, for a start.'

  'Right.' Hinton nodded and smiled like a pinched balloon. 'Which is mightily reassuring, my friend, you being a forlorn and hopeless prisoner incarcerated deep within the most forgotten intestine of the most forgotten bowels of the entire judicial digestive system. Whoopee. If only there were room, I'd do a little whirligig of joy.'

  I swivelled round, grabbed his tieless shirt collar, and hauled his face within bristle distance of my own. 'Let's just try it this way for a few seconds: I talk, you listen. OK?'

  Hinton nodded as best he could, without actually throttling himself.

  'You can't get out of here, because you're not officially in here, right?' Hinton opened his mouth and I tightened my grip. 'Don't answer that; it's rhetorical. So what you have to do before you can get out, is somehow to get in. To get in, all you have to do is commit a crime. Just a small crime, a little misdemeanour, just big enough for you to get caught, get charged, get tried, get processed. To get out of the machine, first you have to get in it.' I relaxed my grip, but Hinton stayed where he was, in a kind of tortured crouch, halfway between sitting and standing.